Sep 5, 2006

I received a request over the weekend, over the US labor day weekend, to provide an article describing my purposes in writing a blog and blog articles.

For those of you looking for something funny from the Harry site, this would be a good time to scroll or click on to a new article. I'll have more writing coming, but for now I need to take a quick break and collect my thoughts.

I write for several blogs, some of them belong to myself, some belong to other groups or organizations and a few belong to my clients. I write professionally for some of these groups, for some of these groups I write for creative purposes, and for many of these blogs I write to have knowledge and information published.

This last concept is key. I primarily write to publish information on the internet where it might prove useful for someone, somewhere someday.

I have written volumes of articles, emails, papers, reports, thesis, hypothesis, proofs, case studies and more over the years. Many of these items have been for select or limited audiences and many if not most of them are removed from circulation within a very short time. Much of my writing has been lost forever in the recesses of decommissioned hard drives and servers in various corporate vaults, storage closets, dumpsters and land fills across the country. In publishing my articles on the internet and in a blog, I receive the benefit of sharing my knowledge and small kernels of wisdom to others that might find it useful in the future.

I have been mining the internet and other sources for information for years, and I am now starting to give back to the world a bit. Some of my writing is frivolous and without meaning. Some of it as a limited shelf life and will not age well. Some of it is highly contextual and will not make sense to audiences. Some of the words and writing will probably come back to haunt me.

I have no fear of the internet nor of my writing nor of my thoughts. I understand many of my strengths and far too many of my weaknesses. I strive to continually improve and over time my writing will continue to benefit.

Since I started blogging or writing for blogs, I've experimented in many different writing mediums. Many of these experiments were complete and utter failures and disasters. Some have been great successes. Some of my failures continue to this day as I find new ways to experiment and learn about new boundaries and areas where failure in blogging can occur.

I have had several successes in my writing as well. I have continued some of my efforts that have succeeded and despite the success, I have halted a few of them. I have the ability to succeed in some areas or topics, however I do not always choose to proceed in that direction. In some cases they represent a step backward and do not offer as much personal satisfaction or growth as I might achieve moving forwards in areas where my immediate success is in question.

My blogging is not 100% about writing. Much of my work has many many related purposes. My blogging efforts have worked to compliment my consulting business. I have established new clients and new friends through my blogging activities and relationships. I have used my blogging as an incentive for myself to continue developing my web design and programming skills. I find that blogging provides a very useful outlet for me to learn how to program and design sites, activities even marketing campaigns on the internet.

These are projects that can not be spoon fed in a class room. Like an artist I sometimes find that I have to follow these projects to their natural conclusion. I mine my projects and topics and blogs for the vein of gold or silver or copper that yields a raw ore. I then labor to refine the material and the context in which I received the material into something useful.

I have also experimented in blogging for financial gain. I see nothing wrong with this activity and in fact find it as an aspect that validates my projects and efforts. If I want to continue with my projects and my education I must fund my expenses and my efforts and my time and my new project concepts.

Blogging is an evolving online form. It has been around in multiple forms for several years. I see it evolving in an iterative fashion. Many of the attributes that led to financial success in blogging 2-3 years ago work today and many do not work as well. New metrics of success and new avenues for financial reward are being created on a weekly or monthly basis.

I suspect that as the form continues to evolve it will ebb and flow in trends into and away from some good and some bad aspects. I find the current flow of wiki related writing and group editing to be a very valuable contribution. I suspect that this form will serve to catalogue a substantial amount of content over the next few years.

Blogging has the ability to capture the essence of thoughts and emotions as compared to a wiki that attempts to remove and objectify a concept. Both are tools that are invaluable but can be over and under developed and utilized.

I am positive that video and audio related productions will continue to grow and will likely over take the current two dimensional version of the internet and blogosphere. This is the area that I am focused on today and will likely be focused on for several years to come. At the end of the day blogging offers up a means of communicating with groups or individuals from around the world.

Audio and video will create the potential to streamline the communications process and allow people to come together, share and learn ideas and do so in both an objective wiki like environment and then to debate out those objectives with our own personal subjective attitudes, foundations, perspectives and individualized styles. This represents the frontier for me today, and I am charging forward towards this frontier both from a production, and programming perspective but also from a hardware enabling perspective. Our physical tools need to improve if we are to make optimal use of the audio and video mediums that are breaking out of their toddler stage.

So as I wrap up, I blog for many reasons, but the overall premise is that I blog for personal development and growth and to enjoy the path that I'm traveling. I do not blog towards a destination but to savor the path.

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NaNoWriMo

This year I'm writing a book, currently title, Infected with Time as part of the National Novel Writing Month event. I'm utilizing two of my favorite software tools to write the book, Dragon Naturally Speaking and MindManager. Wish Me Luck, as the novel gets more organized (writing and editing as I go) I'll start publishing chapters so that you can follow along.